That’s an unfair conclusion. Those examples were pretty specific and I, at least, see no reason to generalize (except maybe the insurance one), except perhaps along the lines of “serving exploitative monopolies is bad”
What I meant is that you can find an example in nearly every business of some person (or group of people) getting "screwed over", which is of course subjective. So subjectively, you could make the case that every business is "exploitative" (like the other replier who claims every capitalistic business is exploitative).
In fairness, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. If you take that to its logical conclusion, then there is no ethical software development that supports capitalist endeavors.
If you take what I said to the logical extreme then sure.
What I was trying to say was that it's very black and white thinking to say something like ads = exploiting users and healthcare = not exploiting users.
Since Facebook usually comes up when people talk about unethical companies, let me use them as an example. Let's say there is a team that improves ad targeting by 5%, helping to reduce the number of irrelevant ads people see. Let's say there's another team that reduces data center electricity's utilization by 5%, which helps the environment.
Is the ad team more or less ethical than the data center team if they are basically both supporting the same end goal?
I don't work for Facebook if that matters. And I have no answers to any of the questions I posed above outside of my personal preference to not work in online advertising unless I need to do it to survive.
